regarde-moi toujours comme ca

Huh, that's an interesting point. I wasn't 100% on board with Gregor-as-pallbearer either, mainly because I thought his "how much he cares" was better shown in his being one of the chief mourners. OTOH, this is pretty much the only situation ever where Gregor could get away with doing something physical and laborious in public, and if that's how he needed to deal with his grief... but that's me being an apologist more than anything.

My guess is that, amongst people who write drabbles, she's not really at the top because it's never been remotely her main thing. They're a tight medium, and a lot harder than they look, so I guess it didn't bug me that much that she could have drabbles that didn't blow me away. They conveyed the emotions I wanted to be feeling then, so that's how they worked for me.

Hearing that the next book is going to be set pre-Cryoburn also makes me wonder just how much Lois is even willing to write in a post-Aral world. Here we have his death, but in the next book, he's still alive. Maybe she won't ever write anything chronologically beyond Aral's funeral, though I expect there'll at least be a short story or something at some point. I got the sense that in some ways, she feels like Miles does in terms of Aral having been a backbone to the whole series, and everything's changed without him. I don't know that she'd have been willing to tackle writing the aftermath in a regular prose form. Maybe it's that sense of her being a little bit lost in how to deal with it, too, that's both what I found kind of endearing and what you found too fanwriting-esque?